One year ago today: February 28, 2020, more finger-pointing, please.
Five years ago today: February 28, 2016, Chimbote.
Nine years ago today: February 28, 2012, smoked herring = good.
Random years ago today: February 28, 2015, treastise on horseradish.
As ever, the physical down time for me allows other pursuits, and this time I was seeking to reset this XP computer to recognize a terabyte drive. It’s not that hard, but the drive has to be initialized and formatted in XP, and I already have data on it. Where’s my 2 terabyte, my third empty glass. This is where DOS comes in handy. I’ve also installed my old RALink wireless antenna, which works okay on everything except my heavily enciphered e-mail account. But that’s just a matter of time for the workaround.
Elliott & I rarely see eye-to-eye on music, he’ convinced country music is simple. Maybe the kind he listens to, but the issue today is how the Eagles have finally become the highest selling musicians in history. I’m mistrustful of such claims because of the changing nature of music recording. The Beatles ushered in the change from singles (45s) to albums (33s), so my question is, if The Beatles sell a thousand singles, and the Eagles sell a thousand albums, what is the basis of comparison? What if it is a Clapton album where you have to buy the whole album to get two hits?
Anyway, the Eagle’s “Greatest Hits” has sold 38 million copies, finally overtaking Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, which I don’t believe I’ve ever heard and do not consider the same category of music to make the comparison. The Eagle’s mouthpiece, Henley, is a DRM nutcase. He wants to be paid for anybody playing “more than 3 lines” of any Eagle’s tune, is what I heard. My position is unchanged, that while it should be illegal to copy and sell somebody else’s material, that should not extend to playing it live. Because the player is paid for his talent, not the music.
And I do not accept the DRM argument that if people cannot hear any given music for free, they would go out and buy it retail. Sure, I have a pirated copy of “Long Tall Texan”, but you’d be crazy to think I’d pay anything for the real thing. More to the point, I say the DRM, as worded, was meant to apply to recorded music only. It is an RIAA con-job to twist the application to live performances. I say copyright is exists solely to prevent diminished demand for the original, while Elliott believes in the current interpretation by special interest groups is correct. Question, if somebody has jurisdiction over both what you are allowed to play or listen to, how will this law be enforced?
Orange juice with ginger.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Long distance troubleshooting. The Reb called and the fridge was out. It took five minutes to find the problem which tattles on how much time I’m spending there. It was a wet plug out on the back porch, not a bad piece of detective work. Reb is a bit distraught, can’t blame her. Several people had noticed the door left open but nobody went over to check until morning. It will be a while yet, but I was prepared to drive there if the electric could not be fixed. My method of dealing with days like this involves shutting down all but the necessaries. I know most people can’t but I worked hard to have it so.
Next, I set up Firefox for XP, which went okay except I got the version in Esperanto. The language of business is English and it should always be at the top, but no, Firefox has to be in your face with their agenda. US English is version 59.2, you are supposed to know that, telepathically. No wait, all the languages are 59.2. Way to go, Firefox, even ESP can’t figure out your screwy logic.
Some explosive emotions coming out of the political meetings where Trump is the keynote speaker. There’s nothing like it on the other side, Trump is the outsider they will never be able to harness. Like the Democrats have been infiltrated by the radical left, the Republicans have been taken over by, what would you call it, the Patriot party. Looks like he’s using the rope they gave him to hang himself. I’m no political pundit, but human nature never fools me. Some say there is nothing to stop the Democrats from continuing to steal elections, but it seems to me they’d best not try the same old. Loved when Trump said maybe in 2024, he’ll beat them a third time. There’s a movement in California, says Vince James, to delete all the gang databases. The reason? They are racist because most of the gang members are non-white. Apparently the motive is to improve the crime statistics, duh. But that is the sort of mentality that liberalism lets rise to the top.
ADDENDUM
Next here’s a bit of reading. It’s a copy of a few e-mails sent in reply to an on-going discussion between Elliott and I over DRM and it’s roll in copyright law as I see it. Don’t get too beady-eyed reading each passage, since you cannot see the questions that were asked or the lead up to many parts. However, you may find the presentation informative. Which topics are repeated and clarified, and how it is done from which angle, and so on. You’ll rapidly note that I see copyright as a series of related issues. To me, the act of copying, the copy itself, and the use to which it is put are not the same, and DRM very much seeks to amalgamate them into a single law, guilty of part, guilty of all. Enjoy.
Yeah, DRM is a bitch. They want laws passed that charge by the person by the listen for each piece of music. I'm totally against it, not that they don't deserve to be paid for what they own, but because such laws cannot be enforced without monitoring people's activities 24/7--the total destruction of privacy. Which is what I suspect they are really after. There is only one activity on-line bigger than advertising, and they've seen what Google did.
When DRM began fining clubs & pubs in Florida, including bands that played cover tunes, I had this idea. I figured I could buy up the rights to all the tunes played most in Hollywood. Then the guitar players who yanked me around would have to pay me--see, I knew they were functionally incapable of learning new material. So I inquired at the HQ in Nashville. I don't know if I told you about that. I sent them a list and asked for a price quote. They replied within minutes, telling that's not how it worked. They wanted me to sign a contract detailing every aspect of my personal life, which they would "inspect" and once my "deposit"was paid in full, inform me of which 100 songs they would "allow" me to license and for how much.
DRM was one of the first corporate-political acts pushed through, to override the former copyright law. I pointed it out, but of course nobody listened. The essence of copyright is that it was only enforceable where an activity diminished demand for the original. But there was always an underlying false perception that if someone could not get a piece of music for free, they would rush out and buy it at full retail. This was marked by the rise of albums rather than singles, you probably remember the change over. Now you had to buy the entire 20-song album to get the two hits. This was the real beginnings of piracy, and it serves them right. In no time at all there were metal oxide cassettes that people could compile their own tapes and it was a small step to go digital.
What I would like to see is a court case in which some musician defends himself by saying he was not infringing on copyright, but actually giving the DMR people free advertising. The greedy DRM people would say the money he was paid belongs to them, but he could argue he was not paid for their music, rather he was paid for his musical ability. Yep, I'd like to see a trial where that distinction is argued just to force the DRM to state their position once and for all. I'm not so sure the copyright law has changed so much as it was slipped past Congress via patronage and payoffs. We were assured the DRM was strictly to protect the ownership of recorded music rights. There are a few centuries of tort infringement law that makes it clear that the purpose was to protect the rights of the owners to generate revenue from sales. Revenue from any other source was not addressed for instance, a town crier paid to announce one of Shakespeare's plays was not an act of infringement. The law is silent on most aspects of this except to ban the outright copying of material in a manner that impacts sales of the original. There are other laws, in fact, which solidly protect people's rights repeat what they saw or heard,and if it harms, that is not a copyright, but a defamation concern. This larger body of law is not in question, either in wording or purpose DRM is the exceptoion, the operative word being "digital".
DRM is a small group that have corrupted the law for their own purposes. I followed the debate, but not the individual arguments during the run-up to DRM, and every clause of it was ambiguously worded to prevent the very repetition (as differentiated from copying) of anything to which RIAA claimed the right to determine as ownership. That, I believe most people would not accept. If allowed free reign, the RIAA would buy the rights to the Eiffel Tower and charge people to take a picture. Pay-per-view is their baby. Thus, most thinking people were against DRM if only because of the potential for abuse. I also believe the advent of most forms of electronic copying, from magnetic tapes, disks, files, scans, and images are NOT regulated by DRM law, rather only the purpose to which the copies are put. DRM seeks to make the copies themselves illegal and have largely succeeded because there is no money in fighting them. You don't get any reward for proving them wrong, a masterstroke of legal manipulation on their part.
For clarity, my statement on performing being "free advertising" was always a weak point, probably laughable in court. I meant it rhetorically, to be said for effect rather than a valid defense. But I do maintain that when I perform anything live for money, I am being paid for the performance, not the material. You cannot copyright a performance, but you can copyright a recording of it. This is the distinction that RIAA always intended that DRM obscure.
